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Heritage expert Don Luxton in his office in the 100-year-old Rogers Building owned by Equitable Real Estate Investment Corp. Tuesday, November 06, 2012 in Vancouver, B.C.

Photograph by: Ian Lindsay
, PNG staff photo

A prime source for information is vintage copies of The Vancouver Sun. The paper not only reported on the development of buildings, it often published special sections to mark the opening of landmark structures.

When the Marine Building opened on Oct. 8, 1930, for example, the Sun had an eight-page supplement celebrating the Art Deco wonder that "suggests some great marine rock rising from the sea, clinging with sea flora and fauna, tinted in sea green, flashed with gold, at night a dim silhouette piercing the sea mists."

The Hotel Vancouver should have opened about the same time - construction began in 1929. But the Depression intervened, and the building was unfinished for a decade. It was finally opened on May 23, 1939, just in time for the Royal Tour of Canada by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

The Sun marked the occasion with a 10-page Hotel Vancouver supplement. It wasn't all platitudes: a timeline noted the checkered history of the building, which was initially supposed to be a Canadian National Railway hotel that would have competed with the existing Hotel Vancouver at Georgia and Granville.

The existing Hotel Vancouver was owned by CN's rival, the Canadian Pacific Railway. But times were so tough in the Depression that the competitors decided to run the new hotel together, and tear down the old hotel. Which is unfortunate - it was one of the most beautiful buildings ever constructed in Vancouver.

The special sections were lavishly illustrated with photographs. Most have disappeared from the files over the years, but you come across some mindblowers - the Sun's Marine Building file has an artist's conception of the building that was probably done in 1928, and has subtle differences from the finished building (the words "Marine" were written over the front entrance in the W.H. Hillier drawing, but were deleted on the real deal).

You find some amazing stuff in the Sun's library. Flipping through the Lions Gate Bridge file, I was surprised to come across an original blueprint of the structure.

Unique blueprint

It was done in August 1936 for the First Narrows Bridge Company by Monsarrat and Pratley engineers from Montreal, in concert with associate engineer W.G. Swan of Vancouver. It shows the distance the span had to cross the first narrows (5,991½ feet), the elevation above Burrard Inlet (200 feet), and what's beneath the water (rock and sandstone near the Stanley Park side, gravel as you go toward West Vancouver).

Don Luxton co-wrote a book on the Lions Gate Bridge a few years ago, but had never seen a blueprint like it until I showed it to him.

"It looks like something that might have been handed out by the company as a promotional piece," he said. "It's certainly not part of the regular blueprints that were done for the bridge. I think it's a one-off, and I don't know of any (others) that have survived to this point."

Bearing this in mind, I decided to look in the Burrard Bridge file. Tucked away amid a couple dozen photos was a dazzler: a Nov. 12, 1943 photo of the Burrard Bridge with a steel railway bridge added at the bottom.

The bridge was designed with a railway crossing in mind, but the federal government didn't have the money to build it during the Depression, so they just left a couple of big slots where it could be retrofitted in later. The city repeatedly asked the feds to build it (in 1934, 1937, 1940, 1943, 1948, 1954 and 1956), but no money was forthcoming, and it finally gave up when it sold a right of way at the northeast end of the bridge in 1967.

The railway bridge in the 1943 photo was drawn in by an anonymous Sun artist. As president of Heritage Vancouver, Luxton has studied the Burrard Bridge extensively, but had never seen an artist's conception of what the railway bridge would have looked like.

"I have seen plans for what they were going to do, but I have never actually seen a rendering of it at all," he said.

"The only things we have are renderings from 500 feet up looking down, but there was no real sense of what that would have looked like at ground level. I was blown away by (the Sun picture), because it's like wow, that's what it would have looked like."

Vancouverites who were around in the 1950s and 1960s will recall there were several plans for downtown freeways and a third crossing to the north shore. The Sun's files have details of several, including artist's conceptions of a freeway that would have sliced through the West End like a big trench. There is also a doctored photo from Jan. 22, 1971 that shows a peninsula jutting out into Coal Harbour, the beginning of a tunnel under Burrard Inlet.

"The tunnel peninsula will have the character of a park created by nature and used by man," read the promotional cutline for the photo. "It is ringed by beaches together with vantage viewpoints threaded onto a slow scenic drive."

People were obsessed with getting rid of the traffic jams that plagued the Lions Gate Bridge. In November 1954, Victor David, head of David Neon Ltd., gave The Sun a copy of his sketch for another tunnel beneath Burrard Inlet, a sleek design that included a Pacific Great Eastern railway stop on top.

Civic centre plans made

The Urban Renewal file has several designs that were never completed, such as a May 2, 1948 proposal for a civic centre at Pender and Beatty across from the Sun Tower. It would have included seven buildings and stretched two blocks west to Hamilton and two blocks south to Georgia. But it became a parking lot and the Vancouver Community College.

Architects McCarter and Nairne (who designed the Marine building) drew up another civic centre proposal for the same site in 1947. The only part of the plan that is still in the Sun files is a sketch for an underground parking garage for 2,000 cars that was topped by a park.

"They were starting to plan cities for the car (after the Second World War), so it was a new era," Luxton said. "They were planning for growth, which hadn't occurred for years. Since 1929, there was the Depression and the war. There hadn't been a lot of planning and growth since the '20s, so it was long overdue."

There are many plans in the Sun files for highrise towers that were never built.

Architect C.B.K. Van Norman designed a 31-storey office building for the northwest corner of Burrard and Georgia in May 1965 that featured dark glass with a white top and bands on the corners. Five months later, the Sun carried a story on a 35-storey Van Norman design for the same site. Neither were built, although the May design would have been a nice fit with the nearby Bentall towers.

One of the wackiest concepts in the files is a 1966 model for Blocks 42 and 52 along Granville between Robson and Dunsmuir, today's Pacific Centre. On top of the Eaton's building is a rooftop motel. There is also a 1967 drawing of an Alpine Village at the top of Grouse Mountain that included a 15-storey hotel.

Many gems are gone

But enough of these artist's conceptions. The Sun's writers and photographers have spent a century covering the built city. Alas, many fabulous buildings are no longer with us.

The Sun has been covering the controversies surrounding their destruction for decades, and the photo files are brimming with images of lost gems like the Georgia Medical-Dental Building, the Pan-tages Theatre and the Birks Building.

Many of the coolest shots capture old buildings as background - they were doing a story on jaywalking on Oct. 14, 1949, and got a fabulous picture of a couple of women crossing streetcar tracks (which are on top of cobblestones) in front of the Rex theatre on Hastings. There's another shot of jaywalkers crossing Hastings near Cambie, with a long-gone brick Bank of Commerce just west of Victory Square.

Then there are the buildings that people have simply forgotten, like a stunning Victorian-style Bank of Montreal that used to be at the northeast corner of Granville and Dunsmuir. With its turrets and stone facade, it looks like something on Saint Catherine Street in Montreal.

One of the most intriguing photos I've come across is a 1938 picture of an Art Deco house in Shaughnessy. Sadly, there is no information on where it was. But thanks to the Sun archives, we know that it existed.